The economic outcome of all these changes can be expressed mathematically; and it is significant. According to an estimate by Mr. Henry Wright in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the structure of the dwelling house represented over ninety percent of the cost in 1800. Throughout the century there was a slow, steady increase in the amount necessary for site, fixtures, and appliances, until, in 1900, the curve takes a sharp upward rise; with the result that in 1920 the cost of site and mechanical equipment has risen to almost one-half the total cost of the house. If these estimates apply to the simple dwelling house, they apply, perhaps, with even greater force to the tenement, the office building, the factory, and the loft: here the cost of ventilation, of fireproof construction, of fire-prevention and fire-escaping devices, makes the engineering equipment bulk even more heavily.
Whereas in the first stages of industrial development the factory affected the environment of architecture, in its latest state the factory has become the environment. A modern building is an establishment devoted to the manufacture of light, the circulation of air, the maintenance of a uniform temperature, and the vertical transportation of its occupants. Judged by the standards of the laboratory, the modern building is, alas! an imperfect machine: the engineers of a certain public service corporation, for example, have discovered that the habit of punching windows in the walls of the building-machine is responsible for great leakages which make difficult the heating and cooling of the plant; and they hold that the maximum efficiency demands the elimination of windows, the provision of “treated” air, and the lighting of the building throughout the day by electricity.
All this would perhaps seem a little fantastic, were it not for the fact that we have step by step approached the reality. Except for our old-fashioned prejudice in favor of windows, which holds over from a time when one could see a green field or a passing neighbor by sitting at one, the transformation favored by the engineers has already been accomplished. Just because of the ease in installing fans, lights, and radiators in a modern building, a good part of the interiors of our skyscrapers are fed day and night with artificial light and ventilation. The margin of misuse under this method of construction is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximum exploitation of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute—“just as good as the original” and much more expensive.
By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning, we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst; where we rob them of the faintest trace of vegetation or fresh air, we build metalled roads which will take a small portion of them, once a week, out into the countryside. It is all a very profitable business for the companies that supply light and rapid transit and motor cars, and the rest of it; but the underlying population pays for its improvements both ways—that is, it stands the gratuitous loss, and it pays “through the nose” for the remedy.
These mechanical improvements, these labyrinths of subways, these audacious towers, these endless miles of asphalted streets, do not represent a triumph of human effort: they stand for its comprehensive misapplication. Where an inventive age follows methods which have no relation to an intelligent and humane existence, an imaginative one would not be caught by the necessity. By turning our environment over to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held out—that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our existence.
III
To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr. Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects, according to the position one may take.
“As the building more and more takes on the character of the machine,” says Mr. Jones, “so does its design, construction, and operation become subject to the same rules that govern … a locomotive. Our grandfathers built for succeeding generations. The rate of development was slow, and a building which would satisfy the demands made upon it for a century would necessarily be of a substantial nature. But with us in a single generation even the best we can do with all the data and facilities at our command is out of date almost before it shows signs
